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Moishe Felman

1926
—Sokolow Podlaski, Poland

The youngest of seven children, Moishe was raised in a Yiddish-speaking, religious Jewish home in Sokolow Podlaski, a manufacturing town in central Poland with a large Jewish population of some 5,000. Moishe's parents ran a grain business. Moishe attended a Jewish school and began public school in Sokolow Podlaski in 1933.

1933-39: Summer vacation had just finished and 13-year-old Moishe was about to begin another year at elementary school when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. German aircraft bombed Sokolow Podlaski's market and other civilian targets before German troops entered the town on September 20. Three days later, they set fire to the main synagogue. Later, the Germans confiscated the family's grain business.

1940-42: Over the next two years, the Germans imposed restrictions on the Jews, eventually ordering them to wear an identifying Jewish star on their clothing. On September 28, 1941, the Germans set up a ghetto and concentrated all of the town's Jews there. About a year later, on the most solemn holiday of the Jewish religion, the Day of Atonement, the Germans began to round up the people in the ghetto. Those who resisted or tried to hide were shot. Moishe, his mother andsister were herded onto the boxcar of a train.

On September 22, 1942, Moishe and his family were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. He was gassed there shortly after arriving. He was 16 years old.

Moishe Felman was one of the brothers of Mendel Feldman, who left Sokolow Podlaski after the German occupation of the town and ran east in the Soviet Union during the war. Mendel's mother and other brothers, Moishe and Fischel refused to leave and were ultimately murdered at Treblnka. Mendel immigrated to the U.S. in 1949. He is survived by 2 sons, Boris and Fred, and a daughter, Charlotte, who live in Palo Alto, California, Potomac, Maryland, and Kensington, New Hampshire.